U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/615,726, titled “A METHOD AND MECHANISM FOR THE CREATION, MAINTENANCE, AND COMPARISON OF SEMANTIC ABSTRACTS.” filed Jul. 13, 2000, referred to as “the Semantic Abstract application” and incorporated by reference herein, describes a method and apparatus for creating and using semantic abstracts for content streams and repositories. Semantic abstracts as described in the Semantic Abstracts application include a set of state vectors. Thus, storing the semantic abstract requires storing each vector in the set, taking up a lot of storage space. Further, measuring the distance between a semantic abstract and a summary of a document using the Hausdorff distance function, a complicated function, requires numerous calculations along the way to calculate a single distance.
The Semantic Abstract application discusses techniques for simplifying the semantic abstract (e.g., by generating a centroid vector). Such techniques have limitations, however; most notably that particular information can be lost.
Accordingly, a need remains for a way to construct a single vector that captures the meaning of a semantic context represented by a clump of vectors without losing any information about the semantic context.